Papers by Estella Ciobanu
East-West Cultural Passage, 2019
This essay studies scenes that focus on food and eating in the films Chocolat (2000) and I Served... more This essay studies scenes that focus on food and eating in the films Chocolat (2000) and I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2006). To assess whether or not they constitute food porn we compare and contrast such scenes with the description of an unwholesome recipe for cannibalistic eating in Titus Andronicus, which anticipates our contemporary food obsession. At its most basic (and controversial), food porn names the alluring visualisation of certain foodstuffs, which renders food the object of erotically tinged desire. Serving different purposes in the two films, such eroticisation of food can be more than self-referential insofar as it indicates human interactions framed as power relations. Showing chocolate making and eating, in Chocolat, actually visualises a woman’s exertion of power over the women and their husbands in a bigoted French village in 1959, intended to awaken the people’s benumbed desire. Not food proper is the object of desire in the Cz...
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Abstract
This paper investigates the ideological underside of the early modern anatomical projec... more Abstract
This paper investigates the ideological underside of the early modern anatomical project, with its capacity for establishing iconic if haunting presences, and its transdisciplinary ramifications, which colluded with the discursive practices of colonialism to mystify “exploration” and “discovery” of the body as a disinterested, noble scientific pursuit in the service of (healthy) humanity. Early modern anatomy produced the “body-as-knowledge” through unacknowledged violence, epistemic and representational, against the human body and the individual, thereby begging the question of the power relations and power–knowledge enmeshed in the anatomical practice. When Vesalius named anatomy an “Apollinea disciplina,” he anticipated the ostentatious deification of the practice and implicitly of its practitioners too, which anatomy book frontispieces would soon propound. In fact, the very co-operation of anatomist and artist in imaging body-knowledge was partly responsible for tacitly making the Metamorphoses’ Marsyas into an exemplar of knowledge acquisition, transcoded as the anatomical écorché, and Apollo into its transcendental guarantor, Goddess Anatomia. Ovid’s Marsyas was thereby re-morphed into a memorable icon of anatomy. Such iconicity obtained, however, through the pervasive presence of Marsyas across the larger spectrum of early modern visual production: anatomical illustration and the fine arts converged on displaying the écorché as the gateway to rationally devised if empirically gained knowledge, yet occluded both its violent epistemic operation and its exertions to establish the anatomist’s scientific supremacy.
Key words: early modern anatomy, Andreas Vesalius, Juan Valverde, Marsyas, power, body-as-knowledge, iconicity
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It has been noticed of late that anatomical representations in any medium have always claimed to ... more It has been noticed of late that anatomical representations in any medium have always claimed to depict the actual, living human body in realistic visual terms. Nonetheless, realism is anything but objective – itself a deeply problematic concept – or value-free. Like in the arts, realism in anatomy is a technique which disavows its epistemic condition by conventional fiat, and traditionally convincingly so. Furthermore, both " realist " anatomical sketches past and present and state-of-the-art medical simulators do not so much contribute to the advancement (and dissemination) of body knowledge as they represent, reproduce and thus tacitly reinforce societal values and understandings as framed within the anatomo-medical discipline. This paper investigates ways in which practices of anatomical representation past and present, in particular the La Specola ceroplastics (as remediated in the Encyclopedia Anatomica's photographs) and contemporary anatomy books, can yield metacognitive insights into western epistemology via the anatomo-medical sciences. The broad feminist framework I have adopted enables a critique of scientific discursive practices, with their engendering of situated knowledges deemed, however, universal and thereby rendered iconic. Setting the (anatomical) stage This unique collection of anatomical wax models from the museum " La Specola, " which is embedded in the tradition of European thought, gives us great insight into the knowledge and understanding of the anatomy of the human body as it existed at the end of the 18 th century. (von Düring 66) I examine here two categories of western anatomical representations produced in the eighteenth-and early-twenty-first-century, respectively, to study the " insight " they offer us " into the knowledge and understanding of the anatomy of the human body " (von Düring 66) as it has been forged since early modernity. My departure point is the commentary written by neuroanatomist Monika von Düring to the anatomical waxwork collection of Museo La Specola, Florence, as remediated 1 in the Encyclopedia Anatomica. However, I will try a different tack than von Düring in addressing the metacognitive dimensions of the famed ceroplastics, and argue that investigating anatomical representations against the grain – the grain explicit or implicit in anatomo-medical discursive practices – might generate new understandings of whether (and how) the scientific study of the human body can also yield remarkable metacognitive insights into western epistemology itself. In pursuing this topic I 1 I use remediation in Bolter and Grusin's sense: that new communication technologies challenge the condition of their predecessors, even as the latter attempt to reaffirm it, in a logic of refashioning themselves and each other so as to balance the dynamics of immediacy and hypermediacy (Bolter, Grusin 5–15), which also entails " re-mediat[ing] prior modes of social and cultural modes of communication " (Thacker, Biomedia 8). As various media have always attempted " to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation " (Bolter, Grusin 11), (re)mediations of the body render it the object of communication as illusionistic representation of immediacy.
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Books and Articles by Estella Ciobanu
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Papers by Estella Ciobanu
This paper investigates the ideological underside of the early modern anatomical project, with its capacity for establishing iconic if haunting presences, and its transdisciplinary ramifications, which colluded with the discursive practices of colonialism to mystify “exploration” and “discovery” of the body as a disinterested, noble scientific pursuit in the service of (healthy) humanity. Early modern anatomy produced the “body-as-knowledge” through unacknowledged violence, epistemic and representational, against the human body and the individual, thereby begging the question of the power relations and power–knowledge enmeshed in the anatomical practice. When Vesalius named anatomy an “Apollinea disciplina,” he anticipated the ostentatious deification of the practice and implicitly of its practitioners too, which anatomy book frontispieces would soon propound. In fact, the very co-operation of anatomist and artist in imaging body-knowledge was partly responsible for tacitly making the Metamorphoses’ Marsyas into an exemplar of knowledge acquisition, transcoded as the anatomical écorché, and Apollo into its transcendental guarantor, Goddess Anatomia. Ovid’s Marsyas was thereby re-morphed into a memorable icon of anatomy. Such iconicity obtained, however, through the pervasive presence of Marsyas across the larger spectrum of early modern visual production: anatomical illustration and the fine arts converged on displaying the écorché as the gateway to rationally devised if empirically gained knowledge, yet occluded both its violent epistemic operation and its exertions to establish the anatomist’s scientific supremacy.
Key words: early modern anatomy, Andreas Vesalius, Juan Valverde, Marsyas, power, body-as-knowledge, iconicity
Books and Articles by Estella Ciobanu
This paper investigates the ideological underside of the early modern anatomical project, with its capacity for establishing iconic if haunting presences, and its transdisciplinary ramifications, which colluded with the discursive practices of colonialism to mystify “exploration” and “discovery” of the body as a disinterested, noble scientific pursuit in the service of (healthy) humanity. Early modern anatomy produced the “body-as-knowledge” through unacknowledged violence, epistemic and representational, against the human body and the individual, thereby begging the question of the power relations and power–knowledge enmeshed in the anatomical practice. When Vesalius named anatomy an “Apollinea disciplina,” he anticipated the ostentatious deification of the practice and implicitly of its practitioners too, which anatomy book frontispieces would soon propound. In fact, the very co-operation of anatomist and artist in imaging body-knowledge was partly responsible for tacitly making the Metamorphoses’ Marsyas into an exemplar of knowledge acquisition, transcoded as the anatomical écorché, and Apollo into its transcendental guarantor, Goddess Anatomia. Ovid’s Marsyas was thereby re-morphed into a memorable icon of anatomy. Such iconicity obtained, however, through the pervasive presence of Marsyas across the larger spectrum of early modern visual production: anatomical illustration and the fine arts converged on displaying the écorché as the gateway to rationally devised if empirically gained knowledge, yet occluded both its violent epistemic operation and its exertions to establish the anatomist’s scientific supremacy.
Key words: early modern anatomy, Andreas Vesalius, Juan Valverde, Marsyas, power, body-as-knowledge, iconicity